Abstract

Play up, play up and play the game!', a quotation from Pinter's Birthday Party, is used to introduce a discussion of what I consider more or less sophisticated games whose purpose is to mask or blur the economic realities of globalization, particularly those played within the academic institution called Postcolonial studies. As opposed to this compromised, consensual position, there has also been an increasingly stronger and organized oppositional tendency, not only outside but also within university, of which The Cultures of Globalization, a 1998 publication of the 1996 conference papers on 'Globalization and Culture', is one of noteworthy examples. In the second part of my paper I draw on, among others, some of the contributors' arguments, because they allow what in our academic environment seems to be unthinkable or unsayable to be finally thought and said